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"Moreover, you scorned our people, and compared the Albanese to sheep, and according to your custom think of us with insults. Nor have you shown yourself to have any knowledge of my race. Our elders were Epirotes, where this Pirro came from, whose force could scarcely support the Romans. This Pirro, who Taranto and many other places of Italy held back with armies. I do not have to speak for the Epiroti. They are very much stronger men than your Tarantini, a species of wet men who are born only to fish. If you want to say that Albania is part of Macedonia I would concede that a lot more of our ancestors were nobles who went as far as India under Alexander the Great and defeated all those peoples with incredible difficulty. From those men come these who you called sheep. But the nature of things is not changed. Why do your men run away in the faces of sheep?"

Letter from Skanderbeg to the Prince of Taranto ▬ Skanderbeg, October 31 1460

Pjese nga kjo:
[quote2="New Yorker"]...........................................................
Two days after prosecutors released the indictment, Dick Marty, the Swiss senator, published the results of his investigation. Marty claimed that Thaci and the Drenica group, which included Fatmir Limaj, had built a “formidable power base in the organized criminal enterprises” in the late nineties, and had exerted “violent control” over the heroin trade in the region. During and after the war, Marty wrote, Thaci was the “boss” of a “network of unlawful activity”—one that included a constellation of detention camps in Albania, where some prisoners were subjected to abuse, including torture, murder, and organ harvesting. One of the “leading co-conspirators,” Marty suggested, was Shaip Muja, the surgeon who became Thaci’s health adviser. Marty identified four sites, among them the yellow house outside Burrel, that had served as “way stations” in an organ-trafficking trade. At the farmhouse near the Tirana airport, prisoners were killed, “usually by a gunshot to the head,” before “being operated on.”

Vekaric, who had invited me to visit, excitedly led me into a boardroom, its windows obscured by venetian blinds. At the end of a table sat a man wearing a black baseball cap that shaded his eyes. Vekaric introduced him and offered to let me conduct an interview, provided that I used a pseudonym for the man, who was in Serbia’s witness-protection program.

He was thirty-nine years old, with a mustache and a broken nose, and asked that I call him Adrian. Half Albanian, he grew up in Switzerland, where he became part of a community of Albanian expatriates. In 1997, he joined the K.L.A. Upon enlistment, he said, he went off to train with the French Foreign Legion. Then he travelled to Albania. Once there, he said, he headed toward the border with Kosovo, stopping at a camp near Kukes. Michael Montgomery and Dick Marty have both identified Kukes as the site of an abandoned factory that the K.L.A. transformed into a weapons depot, a barracks, and a jail.

“I met some doctors and started training with them,” Adrian said. “They told me how to take organs out, how to put them aside, and how to transport them.” One of the doctors, he noted, was Lutfi Dervishi—the urologist from the transplant clinic in Pristina.

One day in the spring of 1998, Adrian’s commander stepped on a land mine while on patrol in Kosovo, suffering grave injuries. Adrian and five others carried him, on a stretcher, to the Albanian border, but he died along the way. A van arrived at the border to pick up the commander’s body. Adrian accepted a ride, and was dropped off near the village of Helshan, where another K.L.A. camp had been established—a few tents and a converted schoolhouse. Adrian noticed that two senior K.L.A. leaders were present: Jakup Krasniqi and Sabit Geci. Krasniqi was then the spokesman for the K.L.A., and is now the president of Kosovo’s parliament. Geci headed the K.L.A.’s military police.

This was a crucial turn in Adrian’s story. In July, 2011, a European Union court found Geci guilty of war crimes, based on evidence of prisoner abuse at Kukes and another camp, Cahan. Former K.L.A. officials had long denied the existence of detention camps in Albania, but the Geci trial proved otherwise, and marked one of the most prominent convictions to date of a K.L.A. leader. The judges rendered their verdict after sixteen witnesses, most of them former captives, testified to scenes of depravity.

A Kosovar Albanian I’ll call Enver testified about being detained in Kukes, along with his brother. They had been accused of being spies—charges that they denied. One night, the guards took Enver and his brother into an interrogation room. Enver said that Geci watched as guards beat another prisoner, clubbed him with a rubber-wrapped baseball bat, and rubbed salt into his wounds. Geci himself beat the prisoner with a crutch. He pistol-whipped Enver, and told his men to beat him with metal bars; Enver repeatedly lost consciousness, and they tortured him further by dunking his head in water. On another occasion, the guards at Kukes fitted him and his brother into bulletproof jackets and fired Kalashnikovs at their stomachs until they collapsed. Later, a guard shot Enver’s brother in the knee. Enver begged for help, but his brother bled all night and died the next day.

After saluting Geci and Krasniqi at the camp in Helshan, Adrian told me, he was summoned to the converted schoolhouse. The K.L.A. officers there knew him, and were aware of his medical training. “There were school desks, three in a row, that formed a table,” he said. Three doctors, including Dervishi, stood around the table. K.L.A. guards dragged in a young man—“nineteen or twenty years old”—and lifted him onto the desks. “I didn’t know who he was or his nationality at the time,” Adrian said. The young man’s face was covered with fresh-looking bruises.

Someone tore off the young man’s shirt and splashed rubbing alcohol over his chest. Guards grabbed his wrists and ankles. Adrian suddenly realized what was happening: the prisoner’s organs were to be harvested. He gripped a scalpel and “started cutting” into the young man’s chest. Adrian recalled hearing him scream, in Serbian, “Bože pomozi mi! Nemojte to da mi radite!” (“God help me! Please don’t do this to me!”)

“That was when I figured out that he wasn’t an Albanian,” Adrian told me. Next, he sawed through the rib cage with a bayonet. While two doctors, standing across the table, lifted the prisoner’s ribs, he carved out the heart as it was still pulsing. The young Serb died.

Adrian said that he placed the heart in a box filled with preserving liquids. He put the box in a small cooler and carried it outside to an idling green Volvo 704 sedan. He fitted the cooler into the trunk’s spare-tire cavity. The entire procedure took about forty-five minutes, though to Adrian it “felt like an eternity.” Before he left the camp, Geci congratulated him and slapped him on the back.

Six months later, Adrian said, he received orders to collect a cooler from a house outside Burrel—the notorious yellow house. Adrian said that a doctor, in scrubs, met him at the door and handed him the cooler. Adrian drove to a military airport near Tirana, where a guard opened a gate to a runway. “Then we saw a private jet,” Adrian said. “It had a Turkish flag on the back of the plane.” I now grasped why Vekaric had been so eager for me to meet Adrian: his eyewitness account filled gaps that had stymied prosecutors and investigators for years.
When I asked Adrian if these episodes had darkened his view of the K.L.A., he said that he had “made a wall” in his mind and continued fighting for the group, and for another separatist movement. But in 2002, he said, “I had a problem with my conscience.” He renounced both groups but stayed in Kosovo. Not long afterward, he said, a former K.L.A. commander retaliated by kidnapping him, beating him, and administering electric shocks. He complained to a U.N. police officer; the assailant was eventually convicted of battery. Soon afterward, Adrian said, someone tossed a grenade at his home. He went into hiding, in various Balkan countries, before finally heading to Belgrade and seeking protection from the Serbian authorities.

I asked him if he felt like a traitor.

“I’m not speaking against the Albanian people,” Adrian said. “I’m speaking against people who committed crimes. I gave up everything I had in Switzerland to fight for the K.L.A., so I am not a traitor or a spy. I’m just trying to become a good person. It’s been enough for me to hide all these things in my life. I cannot do it anymore.”

He admitted, though, that he still had some secrets. “There are too many things, too many stories, too many murders that no one has ever heard about,” he said. “Many people saw things. If all of them speak as I speak, these cases would be resolved.”

Adrian’s testimony was striking, but it also seemed to connect one too many dots. By his account, he had participated in the barbaric murder of a Serb, received praise from a notorious war criminal, taken a suspicious package from a doctor at the yellow house, and delivered this parcel to a plane bound for Turkey. And his description of the surgery seemed bizarre: why, for example, had the Serb not been fully sedated?

I decided to see how much of Adrian’s story checked out. The K.L.A. had indeed encamped in Helshan, and in 2004 prosecutors presented in court the testimony of someone who claimed that a K.L.A. veteran had beaten him and administered electric shocks; the initials of the accuser matched those of Adrian’s real name. That same year, the BBC reported that a grenade had been lobbed at the house of someone sharing Adrian’s real name. But most of the story was difficult to authenticate. Dervishi, who was under indictment, and Geci, who was imprisoned, refused to talk. Krasniqi denied ever visiting Helshan in 1998 and told me that the episode Adrian described “could only be constructed in legends and films.”

Prem Shekar, a cardiac-transplant surgeon at Harvard Medical School, told me that Adrian’s tale was medically implausible, starting with the rubbing-alcohol detail. A heart transplant requires a truly sterile environment, he said: “If you take a heart that is harvested in a contaminated scenario, the recipient will get a terrible infection.” He disparaged the notion of removing a warm, pulsing heart. Typically, the heart is injected with a cardioplegia solution while it is still inside the donor, paralyzing the organ. “Only once the heart has cooled and stopped can you take it out,” he told me. Shekar also doubted Adrian’s claim that he had sawed through the Serb’s ribs. In hospitals, Shekar said, hearts are harvested through a “midline split”; a sternal saw is used to crack the breastplate in half. Moreover, a heart can last only four to six hours outside a body. There was simply no way you could transport a heart from a remote camp in Albania to a hospital in Turkey, and then complete a lengthy operation, without the heart failing first. The surgery that Adrian described, Shekar said, would suffice only as “an extremely primitive form of torture.”

I did find Adrian’s supposed commander—the one who had allegedly stepped on a land mine—on a list of K.L.A. martyrs. But the official date of death was May, 1999, a year later than Adrian had indicated. Then I scanned the roster of K.L.A. veterans, but Adrian’s name was not on it. He told me that authorities in Kosovo were “doing their best” to erase his memory from the archives.

I interviewed Adrian four times—twice in person and twice over Skype—and the disparities piled up. Even after I notified him that the commander’s date of death was 1999, he insisted that the Helshan episode had taken place in 1998. “I saw a lot of dead people,” he replied, opening the possibility that he had mistaken the commander for someone else. Originally, he claimed that he hadn’t seen Lutfi Dervishi, the urologist, since that day in Helshan; a month afterward, he said that he had seen Dervishi “later on, way after the war,” at a reception in Kosovo.

He told me that he now lived with his wife in Belgrade; his ex-wife was in Kosovo, and was related to a “very high-level, V.I.P. person.” I tracked down one of Adrian’s relatives in Europe and called her to ask about these purported family connections. (Adrian refused to tell me his ex-wife’s name, or the names of any former K.L.A. fighters who could corroborate his story.) The woman laughed, dismissing Adrian as a pathological liar who had never belonged to the K.L.A. but had served time in Germany for dealing drugs. I discovered that Adrian also had a police record in Serbia, which included vehicle theft, threatening an official with an axe, and lying to police.

Meanwhile, Adrian, under the auspices of Serbia’s Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor, was sharing his tale with others. He got a very receptive hearing from Serbian state television, which, on September 10th last year, broadcast a ninety-minute documentary, “Anatomy of a Crime.” The opening twenty minutes featured Adrian—his face obscured and his voice distorted—describing how he cut out the heart of the young Serb. Vekaric, the deputy prosecutor, also appeared, telling the host, “We absolutely are convinced that he did what he says he did.”

The program’s message was clear: just as Serbian leaders had been held accountable for war crimes, Kosovar leaders needed to be held accountable for the kinds of acts described by Adrian. Within days, Adrian’s story was disseminated around the world, as the A.P., the Telegraph, and other media outlets published summaries of the program. An Agence France Presse report, which quoted Adrian describing how “the blood started pouring” as he made incisions in the rib cage, bore the headline “GRUESOME DETAILS ON WARTIME KOSOVO ORGAN HARVESTING.”

In July, 2010, an appeals court in The Hague granted prosecutors another opportunity to try Ramush Haradinaj, the former K.L.A. commander. (The tribunal does not prohibit double jeopardy.) Not long afterward, the Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor in Belgrade notified prosecutors in The Hague that it had found a witness—one of Haradinaj’s subordinates in the K.L.A.—who had firsthand knowledge of Haradinaj’s misdeeds. That November, a prosecutor from The Hague, Paul Rogers, flew to Belgrade to meet the prospective witness.

Rogers approached the meeting with caution: it seemed unusual for a crucial witness to emerge five years after the indictment. He was also concerned about the possible bias of the Serbian government. But he assigned the witness a number, Eighty-one, and heard him out. In the summer of 1998, Eighty-one said, three men—one Serb and two Roma—were arrested by the K.L.A., accused of collaborating with Serbia, and thrown into a basement near the village of Jabllanice, in southern Kosovo. Haradinaj came to check on the captives. For the inspection, the three prisoners were taken into a courtyard. A Haradinaj lieutenant, nicknamed Toger, sliced off one of the Serb’s ears, while another lieutenant, nicknamed Maxhup, beat the Roma men with a baseball bat. Later, Eighty-one said, Toger cut out one of the Serb’s eyeballs with a knife.

Rogers noticed some inconsistencies in Eighty-one’s narrative, but people often waver when relating disturbing memories. Certainly, the account conformed to suspicions that prosecutors in The Hague had long held about K.L.A. leaders. And so, in November, 2011, Eighty-one flew to The Hague to testify, and underwent ten hours of direct examination in the courtroom.

Haradinaj’s lawyer, an Englishman named Ben Emmerson, leafed through a stack of Eighty-one’s previous statements. “The first account you gave to the prosecution was that only one of the boys’ ears was cut off and that it was cut off by Maxhup and that it was the Roma’s ear,” Emmerson said. “The second account you gave was that only one of the boys’ ears was cut off, but that it was cut off by Toger and that it was the Serb boy’s ear. . . . Now you’re saying two ears were cut off—one of a Roma and one of the Serb.” Emmerson also said, “I appreciate that it’s difficult for you to keep up with the various versions that you’ve given—but that’s because you’re making them up.”

At one point, Eighty-one blamed poor translation for the confusion. Emmerson produced a copy of a document that Eighty-one had signed earlier, attesting to the accuracy of the translations. “This is theatre!” Emmerson said. “The reason why you can’t keep them straight is because they’re all inventions.”

During closing arguments, Rogers conceded that Eighty-one’s testimony had been a disaster, and requested that the judges “ignore that evidence” while contemplating their verdict. Emmerson, in turn, said that Eighty-one was “so slippery with the slime of dishonesty that one felt the need to wash one’s hands.”

A few days later, Emmerson told me he was certain that Eighty-one had been “actively tutored” by Serbia’s intelligence agencies. Last November, Haradinaj was acquitted a second time; the judges cited Eighty-one’s “unreliable” statements as a factor.

Reading the transcripts of Eighty-one’s testimony, I noticed several similarities between him and Adrian. Both had offered unusually detailed accounts of K.L.A. savagery. Both had spent considerable time in the company of Serbian officials. Both had grown up in Switzerland. Both had a rap sheet in Serbia. In their testimony, both emphasized the importance of rank and mentioned saluting K.L.A. leaders—observations that could help prosecutors make a “command responsibility” argument.

I also learned something about the 2004 case in which Adrian had apparently testified to being kidnapped and abused by the former K.L.A. soldier. In March, 2007, the Supreme Court of Kosovo had ordered a retrial, arguing that the accusations were not “in any way corroborated by evidence.” Three years later, the prosecution withdrew its charges. At the time, the case had seemed another example of K.L.A. fighters evading accountability. Now it seemed one more instance of fabulation by Adrian.

Many questions remained. Had the Serbian government, frustrated with its inability to find conclusive evidence of Kosovar organ trafficking, deliberately planted a false story? When, and why, had Adrian begun working for Belgrade? Had his criminal record made him vulnerable to exploitation by the Serbian government? And why, if he was a trained Serbian asset, was he so incompetent?
Then, there was the role of Bruno Vekaric, the prosecutor in the Belgrade office. In his country, he told me, he had been criticized for prosecuting mainly Serbs and for his coöperation with The Hague. Was Vekaric hoping to demonstrate his patriotic credentials by advancing Adrian’s story? When I asked Vekaric if he had been duped by Adrian or was complicit in his fiction, Vekaric responded, “Maybe he is a liar. But in this organ-trafficking story I am sure he is right.”

When I last spoke with Adrian, over Skype, I asked him to confirm that he was also known as Eighty-one. He put on a blue baseball cap and tugged it over his eyes. Pushing himself away from the table, he mumbled something, in Serbian, to a female handler off-screen. She appeared in the frame and said, “He does not want to speak anymore.”

Forensic police procedurals like “C.S.I.” are predicated on the idea that every murder leaves behind a trail of evidence, however faint. In reality, some crimes prove impossible to trace. Conspiracies are hatched in dark rooms; corpses are dissolved in acid; witnesses take secrets to their graves.

Several K.L.A. leaders have survived repeated prosecution. After Fatmir Limaj, Thaci’s confidant, was acquitted in The Hague, the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo charged him with torture and prisoner abuse at a second camp. Prosecutors had persuaded a former guard, Agim Zogaj, to talk. At the camp, Zogaj had kept a diary that contained the names of prisoners. According to a report in Koha Ditore, a Kosovo daily, a “plus” or a “minus” sign beside the name signalled whether the prisoner had been freed or executed—in some cases, on Limaj’s orders. But in September, 2011, a month before Limaj’s trial began, Zogaj was found hanged in a park in Duisburg, Germany—an apparent suicide. The judges declared the diary inadmissible and acquitted Limaj. In November, 2012, however, the judges reversed their decision on the diary, and a retrial is expected to begin soon. Limaj is currently under house arrest in Pristina. A spokesman for the E.U. justified Limaj’s detention by citing the risk that he might tamper with evidence.

A senior E.U. war-crimes investigator told me he was certain that “criminality in Kosovo has not been accounted for.” Yet Serbia’s efforts to promote Adrian’s story had clearly backfired: such tactics only made it easier for the lawyers representing K.L.A. leaders to protest that their clients were victims of slander. Michael Montgomery said that Bruno Vekaric’s office in Belgrade had, in its investigation of organ trafficking, “gone out of its way to screw up everything.”

Nevertheless, the E.U. investigator told me, “With the appropriate degree of rigor, I remain convinced, it is possible to account for the most severe crimes in Kosovar Albanian factions, the K.L.A., and their affiliates, even the most complex criminal conspiracies to traffic human beings for organ extraction.” In August, 2011, the E.U. formed a “special investigative task force” to sort out the organ-trafficking saga once and for all—including the possible role of Kosovo’s leaders.

The E.U. has put an American prosecutor, Clint Williamson, in charge of this effort. Before taking the job, Williamson, a former United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, examined the material gathered by Dick Marty’s team, and concluded that a full-scale investigation was merited. Williamson, an experienced diplomat, knows Kosovo well, and a decade earlier he had worked in The Hague, helping to draft the indictment against Milosevic. It would be hard to depict him as inexperienced or partisan.

Williamson set up his office in Brussels, in a nondescript E.U. government building that is protected by twenty-four-hour surveillance and a secure communications network. He told me that the failure to have a proper reckoning in Kosovo had left a “dark cloud” over the Balkans. He plans to finish his probe in 2014.

Court records pointed to glaring oversights in some previous prosecutions of K.L.A. leaders. For example, a witness in the trial against Sabit Geci—the military-police chief convicted of abuses at Kukes and Cahan—testified that one of Thaci’s top advisers had driven him to Kukes, but the judge dismissed the comment, saying that the adviser was “not a defendant in this trial.” Why hadn’t the prosecutor pursued this potential link between Thaci and Kukes?

There were other possible leads. A former detainee in the Cahan camp has said that guards there “put guns at our heads and made us beat, shoot, even sodomize other prisoners.” He noted, “Our torturers were our fellow-Albanians, the K.L.A., who were supposed to be fighting for our freedom.” The detainee, who remembered Limaj giving orders, said that, at one point, Thaci came in, looked at the prisoners, and “saw that we were tied up, injured, and in such a dirty place.” Thaci and Limaj “knew exactly what they were doing to us.” Parts of the detainee’s story eventually appeared in Le Monde, but prosecutors have not picked up the thread. (At least one other witness has placed Thaci at a detention camp: Enver, the prisoner accused of spying, recalled seeing Thaci at Kukes, wearing civilian clothes.)

In 2011 and 2012, Williamson travelled to Albania. He told me that he considered Albania, not Kosovo, the “single most important operational zone” for the K.L.A.’s alleged crimes. One place of particular interest is the farmhouse by the airport—the spot where, according to Marty, kidneys were removed from prisoners who had been shot in the head. (The owner of the farmhouse, which is in the village of Fushe-Kruje, denies any wrongdoing; he filed a claim to sue Marty for defamation, but the claim was thrown out.)

Williamson admits that the chances of finding a “smoking gun” are slim, since so much time has passed since crimes allegedly occurred. If corpses had to be moved, or videotape destroyed, it was probably done years ago. Without physical evidence, Williamson will have to rely almost entirely on testimony. He noted, “It’s one thing for people to talk to Marty or talk to a journalist. It’s quite another to participate in a criminal investigation where you ultimately have to go into a courtroom and point your finger at very powerful people.” That said, Williamson spent several years working in the Justice Department’s organized-crime-and-racketeering section, and he had found that, with the right combination of incentives, protective measures, and appeals to conscience, “even the most intractable insiders will turn witness.”

Last year, I met Prime Minister Thaci in his office, on the second floor of a drab fourteen-story tower in central Pristina. Jean-François Fitou, the French Ambassador to Kosovo, had told me that Thaci was “the Mick Jagger of the K.L.A.,” and Thaci is indeed dashing, with a clean smile, carefully groomed hair, and a buttery complexion.

Within the K.L.A., Thaci had been known as the Snake—a reference to his slippery evasion of Serbian authorities. The nickname, it seemed, was still appropriate. “Until the war broke out, the Serbs wanted to imprison me,” he said. “In wartime, they tried to kill me. After the war, they tried to compromise me, to destroy my reputation.” Thaci denies having ever been connected to a criminal syndicate and says that he was unaware of any prisoner abuse.

At one point, the conversation turned to Sabit Geci. Germany’s spy agency reported that Thaci had maintained “very good contacts” with him, but Thaci disputed this, saying, “To be frank, he was not my friend.” As we talked about Geci’s crimes, Thaci’s face turned the color of gravel and his smile contorted, as if he could taste his reputation souring on his tongue. “The K.L.A. was big, and you always have abusers in such organizations,” he said. It was almost five o’clock, and many of his aides and assistants had gone home for the day. He sank into a black leather chair and unfastened the top button on his shirt.
If Williamson found conclusive evidence that the K.L.A. had trafficked the organs of prisoners, Thaci said, “that would leave the worst legacy for Kosovo and our people.” But “never did something like this happen” with his knowledge. “That’s why I gave my full support to the task force,” he said. “In order to have the truth prevail.”
The late-afternoon sun slanted across the room. “I give my full support to justice,” he added. “I will be on the side of justice, no matter who is on the other side.”

Regaining his color, Thaci said, with a grin, “The only laws I have violated were Milosevic’s laws. And I feel very proud of that.” ♦[/quote2]

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing